One of the little-noted facts about the Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is that he is the country’s first Orthodox head of government; moreover, religious Zionists are his Yamina party’s key constituency. Unlike Ḥaredim, members of this heterogeneous group serve in the military, generally embrace secular education and work, and, most saliently, wear knitted kippot. Matan Kahana, another Yamina member and the current minister of religious affairs, perhaps embodies this group’s ethos, which can be seen in his attempts to reform the chief rabbinate—efforts that have attracted intra-Orthodox controversy and in a roundabout away led to the current coalition crisis. Matti Friedman writes:

Kahana came to the attention of many Israelis for the first time last June, after the formation of the new government, amid a furious day in the Knesset during which the Likud and the ultra-Orthodox parties, shocked to find themselves removed from power after twelve years, shouted down the coalition’s speakers and disrupted attempts by the new government to present its platform. . . . The ultra-Orthodox MKs had been shouting at Bennett and Kahana to “take off their kippahs.” At the podium, a furious Kahana directed a startling attack at one of the most vociferous of those lawmakers, Moshe Gafni.

The religious-secular fight has been going on since the creation of the state and is familiar to everyone here, but Kahana was saying something different. He wasn’t speaking against religion—he was saying that he was religion, that his religious Zionism was as authentic as the non-Zionist stringency of the ultra-Orthodox, if not more so. He wasn’t throwing out the rabbinic bureaucracy. He was saying the wrong rabbis were in charge.

Kahana is not a liberal. He’s a different kind of religious conservative. “Israel is an Orthodox country,” he told me, and will remain that way in the absence of a wave of new immigrants from liberal Jewish denominations. A compromise to allow non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall should have passed years ago, he said, but he’s not going to be the one to pass it now, because doing so would endanger the coalition’s fragile hold on power. “I don’t want to disappoint my Reform brothers, and I’m choosing my words carefully—my Reform brothers,” he said. “But I’m an Orthodox Jew, a conservative.”

Part of this insistence is an attempt to protect his flank from attempts to portray him as a closet liberal intent on undermining traditional Judaism. But it’s mostly genuine. His reforms are not aimed at weakening the Jewish DNA of the state, but the opposite. He wants a more Jewish Israel. “The less we force Judaism,” he said, “the more people will choose it.”

The Mossad’s heist of a vast Iranian nuclear archive in 2018 provided abundant evidence that Tehran was not adhering to its commitments; it also provided an enormous amount of actionable intelligence. Two years later, Israel responded to international inspectors’ condemnation of the Islamic Republic’s violations by using this intelligence to launch a spectacular campaign of sabotage—a campaign that is the subject of Target Tehran, by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar. David Adesnik writes:

The question that remains open at the conclusion of Target Tehran is whether the Mossad’s tactical wizardry adds up to strategic success in the shadow war with Iran. The authors give a very respectful hearing to skeptics—such as the former Mossad director Tamir Pardo—who believe the country should have embraced the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Bob and Evyatar reject that position, arguing that covert action has proven itself the best way to slow down the nuclear program. They acknowledge, however, that the clerical regime remains fully determined to reach the nuclear threshold. “The Mossad’s secret war, in other words, is not over. Indeed, it may never end,” they write.

Which brings us back to Joe Biden. The clerical regime was headed over a financial cliff when Biden took office, thanks to the reimposition of sanctions after Washington withdrew from the nuclear deal. The billions flowing into Iran on Biden’s watch have made it that much easier for the regime to rebuild whatever Mossad destroys in addition to weathering nationwide protests on behalf of women, life, and freedom. Until Washington and Jerusalem get on the same page—and stay there—Tehran’s nuclear ambitions will remain an affordable luxury for a dictatorship at war with its citizens.